On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Venkatraman S <venka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:20 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <nou...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > What's the intention of the course? The structure of the course would > > depend on that methinks. Is it to > > - Give the students some programming skills so that they can use them > > if needed for their actual work. > > - Appreciate the finer subtleties of what goes on during programming > > so that they can become better managers/decision makers. > > > > The latter would be considerably harder and it wouldn't really be CP-101. > > > > For the former, I think a basic language introduction (say 1/4th of > > the course) followed by intense exercise driven training on 'useful' > > things would be nice. Similar to Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the hard > > way" (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/). The exercises should be > > complex enough to force the people to make some design decisions so > > that they learn to "program". Too often, fibonacci number programs are > > considered good examples and that totally cripples someone trying to > > study the language. > > > Agree with Noufal. The course should be tailored to how we expect them to use it later on. The goal shouldn't be to make them programmers. I would think it should focus on helping them solve bits and pieces problems that they might encounter later on. For most MBA programs, that would probably be quants - statistics, probability, simulation, forecasting, modeling. -- Siddharta Govindaraj http://twitter.com/silvercatalyst _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
